Two-thirds of the Amazon biome, the world's largest remaining tropical forest, is located in Brazil. Around 370 million ha, or 85% of the Brazilian Amazon and 43% of Brazil's land area, remain forested. From the mid-1970s until 2004, aggressive land development strategies made Brazil the world's largest deforesting country: annual forest loss peaked in 1995 and again in 2004, at almost 3 million ha, with much of that cleared land ending up as cattle pasture. Timber extraction still only plays a minor and indirect role in Brazil's forest carbon losses. Large- and smallholders alike contribute to deforestation, facilitated by policy drivers such as subsidized agricultural credits, large-scale road building and resettlement programs (May et al. 2011). The resettlement programs involve the colonization of smallholders into land reform settlements managed by Brazil's agrarian reform institute, INCRA, where there are typically high levels of deforestation due in part to the use of forest clearing as a way to secure tenure rights (Brandão et al. 2012; Duchelle et al. 2014).

Authors: Wunder, S.; Duchelle, A.E.

Subjects: decentralization, deforestation, efficiency, environmental degradation, forest economics, forest policy, forest resources, forests, land use, politics, project implementation, projects, right of access

Publication type: Chapter-R, Publication

Year: 2014